I am a former US government official, having
served, inter alia, as US Ambassador to
Venezuela, Assistant Secretary of State, the
President¹s Special Envoy for the Western
Hemisphere, Special Advisor to the Secretary
of State and Assistant Administrator of the US
Agency for International Development. I am a
veteran of the US Army, and currently the
founder and owner of a small but thriving
consulting firm. My 40-year career has been
devoted to bringing the United States and
Latin America closer together and to help
raise the economic standards of this region.

I do not appreciate, therefore, having my work
belittled and myself insulted by a Newsweek
columnist (³Right Idea, Wrong Time², by Fareed
Zakaria, Newsweek, March 19, 2007) who has
never met me, never talked to me, never had
anyone call to check any facts before writing
about me, does not know my work, and who bases
his views on the opinion of an academic with
whom I have clashed publicly. Zakaria¹s use
of subjective, ad-hominem terms such as
³extremist² and ³weird,² is childish name-calling
expected more of a 12-year old child than from
a Newsweek columnist.

President Bush has just completed his 8th trip
to Latin America in six years in office,
having visited five important countries
including the largest nation, Brazil, the
smallest South American republic, Uruguay, and
our closest neighbor, Mexico. Any visit by a
President of the United States to our home
hemisphere brings both dangers and
opportunities, and this was no exception.
Americans need to know more about this
strategic region of 600 million people.
Fareed Zakaria did not help shed light on the
Americas, but instead allowed his column to be
used by an embittered university professor to
distort the facts.

In a juvenile attempt to trivialize the
president¹s accomplishments and slur his
administration, and me, Mr. Zakaria has done
your readers a disservice.

In his shallow treatment of the subject, Mr.
Zakaria clearly demonstrates his superficial
knowledge of this region and that, frankly, he
was a poor choice to comment on a potentially
significant presidential journey.

Further, by relying entirely on one source for
his column, a Harvard professor who has never
held any non-academic post, Mr. Zakaria
unwittingly allowed his column to be a blunt
instrument used by Dr. Jorge Dominguez to
settle personal scores with me, since
Dominguez and I have clashed publicly in the
past about policy differences.

Mr. Zakaria makes so many errors in his column
that it is impossible to correct them in this
letter. For example, it is false that "...Reich...
is sufficiently extreme and weird that even
the Republican Senate eventually rejected his
nomination." This statement¹s several errors
may be due to Zakaria¹s ignorance rather than
malice. My 2001 nomination as Assistant
Secretary of State was never "rejected" by the
Senate because there was never a vote. The
nomination was blocked by one Senator, Chris
Dodd, who as Chairman of the Sub Committee on
the Western Hemisphere, refused to hold even
the hearing, much less a vote, thus subverting
the process of advice a consent which is
called for under the Constitution for all
presidential nominees. Dodd was able to
thwart the process because the Senate was not
in Republican hands as Z akaria asserts; the
Democrats had taken control of the Senate in
2001 with the party switch of Senator Jeffords
of Vermont, and the Democrats decided to block
a number of nominations to demonstrate their
newfound power (as Republicans also,
unfortunately, have done when in control).

The reason Dodd refused to hold hearings is
that I had sufficient votes to be confirmed,
as the White House Office of Legislative
Affairs informed President Bush. Do you not
think that if Dodd had had enough votes to
defeat a Bush appointee, that he would have
allowed the hearings and a vote?

Of course he would have. That way he would
have embarrassed not only me but the President.
Instead, Dodd refused to allow me even to
testify. As faras being "extreme or weird,"
those are childish insults not worthy of
retort.

Most egregious, however, is Zakaria¹s
fabrication of facts in his description of my
role in the events in Venezuela which resulted
in Hugo Chavez being removed from power for
two days in 2002. Contrary to what Zakaria
states, the State Department Inspector General
has found that neither the State Department,
nor my Bureau, nor my staff nor I played any
improper role. I repeat, Zakaria¹s entire
reconstruction of the aforementioned events is
a fabrication. I refer you to the State
Department website for the Inspector General¹s
report of July 2002 and the factual report of
the role I played.

It is obvious from reading the column that the
source of many of Zakaria¹s falsehoods is
Jorge Dominguez, the only person quoted.
Dominguez and I have differences about Latin
America and particularly Cuba. Recently, for
example, Dominguez called for the public "honoring"
of Fidel Castro as a great man who had
transformed his nation. Some may consider
calling for the honoring of a murderer who has
destroyed his country¹s liberties,
infrastructure and morale to be ³extremist and
weird.² Like many academics that have never
practiced what they teach, Dominguez is
entitled to his bizarre opinions. Most of the
time, the only victims of his oddity are his
students.
This time it was Fareed Zakaria.

In addition to the errors and insults directed
against me, Zakaria¹s column also suffers from
numerous factual mistakes about US policy in
Latin America. For example, in one of his
attempts to denigrate the current President,
Zakaria states that when he was elected,
George W. Bush allowed the ³momentum² of the
North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to
be lost, to the detriment of Latin America¹s
development. Zakaria¹s timeline is off by 8
years. George W. Bush was inaugurated in
2001. NAFTA, negotiated by Bush 41, was
approved by Congress in 1993 with Bill
Clinton¹s support.

Unfortunately, President Clinton allowed the
trade promotion authority (TPA), required for
successful free trade negotiations to lapse
the following year, and thus the US did not
conclude any trade agreements until 2002, when
Pres. Bush managed to have TPA restored by a
margin of a single vote after strong personal
lobbying. Since then the US has concluded FTA
negotiations with Chile, five Central American
nations, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru,
just in this hemisphere. Hardly a ³loss of
momentum.² As I said earlier, your readers
deserve much better than Zakaria¹s historical
distortion, whether it was intentional or
inadvertent.

In the interest of decency and our respective
professional reputations, I urge you to
correct the impression caused by this column.

I would like to settle this amicably, so I
look forward to hearing from you.